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Saturday, October 11, 2008

--Data for Doctors--

Information is power. Everywhere.Information is made up of chunks of data put together into a meaningful structure.

As health care professionals, we produce lots of data everyday when we treat our patients. It includes the patient"s past habits, family history, past diseases, current symptoms, response to certain drugs, reactions to drugs......and on and on.

We need to be able to collect and collate all this data so as to help us in making better decisions in the future. The currently followed practise commonly is -- we treat all the patients according to what we were taught in medical school--.

But illness and disease don't remain static. They evolve everyday. They follow the path of least resistance. Whenever a disease finds a path not blocked by doctors, it pursues rapidly down that path.And we doctors are left guarding only the fixed doorways that we were taught of in Medical school ( or even later, via medical journals)

The only way to stay in the game is to continuously monitor the evolution of the disease by real-time/continuous data gathering and monitoring. This helps us spot very early trends in disease evolution and "block" those paths and escape routes for all diseases.

This article here provides some very good examples and methods of data capturing for clinicians. I hope all doctors in India soon realize the importance of data gathering and analysis in their day-to-day practice.